"Where is Uncle Raphael?" asked Meir.
"Where should he be? He is at the fair, together with Ber, buying bullocks."
"And you, Haim, where are you going?"
But the lad did not even hear the question. Trilling a gay song, he had rushed off where the stir and lively spectacle of the fair attracted him.
Meir went out into the porch and looked around. The fair had scarcely begun, but in the midst of some forty carts he saw Ber discussing the prices of the cattle with the peasants. A little further on he saw Raphael standing in the porch of a house, surrounded by merchants, evidently talking and arranging business, as all their fingers were in motion. To approach these two men, who, after his grandfather, had the greatest, authority in the family, and engage them in private talk was impossible. Meir saw that, and did not even try.
The sight of the motley crowd, where everybody was engaged upon some business of his own, looked strange and unreal. His thoughts were so different from any of the thoughts that moved that bustling multitude.
"Why should it trouble me?" he murmured. "What can I do?" And yet it seemed to him impossible to wait in passive inactivity until a red glare in the sky should announce that the nefarious design had been accomplished.
"What wrong has the man ever done us?" he said to himself. He was thinking of the owner of Kamionka.
His dull, listless eyes rested on the porch of Witebski's house, and he saw the merchant himself standing and leisurely smoking a cigar. He was looking at the lively scene with the eyes of a man who had nothing whatever to do with it. The fact is, he dealt in timber, which he bought in large quantities, from the estates; therefore the fair had no special attraction for him. Besides, he considered himself too refined and thought too highly of his own business to mix with a crowd occupied with selling and buying corn or cattle.
Meir descended the steps and went towards Witebski, who, seeing him, smiled and stretched out a friendly hand.